This website was born in the drab age of “chief executives’ pitches” where runs were plentiful and the game inched along like a tardy slug. We hated it – but fortunately the world moves on. We now find that in an era of two-day Tests, it’s actually quite interesting to watch a team spend almost an entire day going pretty much nowhere.

Sometimes Tour de France riders warm up on stationary bikes before a stage. This seems like an entirely mad thing to do when you’re about to ride a couple of hundred kilometres and scale multiple mountain passes. Save your strength, lads! The reason they do it is that quite often the fastest part of the day’s ride comes right at the beginning and they need to be ready to go ‘full gas’ from the off.

What even the keenest Tour riders most definitely don’t do, however, is pedal on the spot for five long hours before finally moving that first competitive millimetre. This is basically what England did today. 

Are you sitting comfortably?

As a fielding side, opening partnerships are the worst, and first innings opening partnerships are the very worst of the worst. This is because until you take that first wicket, you haven’t actually meaningfully got going in the game. 

Tom Latham and Devon Conway got going. They didn’t set off at a sprint or anything, but they began moving immediately. They then quickly settled on a pace they felt they could maintain. 

Devon Conway in particular isn’t a man who takes good form for granted. The best batters can get complacent and overly ambitious, but when you’re on such intimate terms with awkward scratchiness, you take those good days in a boa constrictor embrace and ensure you make full use of them.

So New Zealand started well and they kept on moving. In contrast, England didn’t roll out of the neutral zone until their opponents were already 317 runs into their day. 

This wasn’t just allowing the opposition a head start. It wasn’t merely doing nothing and falling a long way behind. It was far worse than that. It was working hard to go nowhere. It was five hours of effort to get exactly where you were five hours ago, resolutely joe-rooted to the spot.

It’s an interesting measure of a team to see what they do in a situation like that and 4-44 from a weary, standing start represents quite a surge. 

No-one really talks about how Ben Stokes makes things happen these days. It must have become such a big and obvious cliché that even cricket can’t bear to maintain it any more. Making the breakthrough was making things happen though – albeit only after making that gargantuan head start exist first via his captaincy over the preceding hours. 

What did we learn about anyone else? The three other wickets were shared between three other bowlers – if you can call Joe Root a bowler – which means it’s hard to pick out some standout hard-head who refused to buckle to circumstance. 

The great thing with chief exec pitches though is that there’s always likely to be another day of toil from which to explore the players’ characters and draw your conclusions. Warm up for day two.

Come on, this has gone on long enough now. Can we just have a fresh start? Trust is important, but so is trusting. Maybe it’s time for England to heed the sage words of Rayden in the Mortal Kombat film: “If you are afraid to trust, you will lose.”

But that’s not where we are. That’s not where we are at all. Post Ashes, England are in a world where enough’s been done wrong that being seen to do the right thing has taken on disproportionate importance – even when trying to look like you’re doing the right thing in fact only makes matters worse. 

“The players now have to show the public they can be trusted,” said Rob Key last week. 

This was approximately two sentences after wondering whether he should add an alcohol ban to the mandatory bedtime that is already in place. “Do we need to look at ‘have we been strict enough?'” he mused.

Retiring because he stayed up past his bedtime would be a silly but appropriate end to Ben Stokes’ England career

You know what kind of person always strikes as particularly trustworthy? Someone who’s subject to enforced restrictions on otherwise ordinary activity, that’s who. 

Those kinds of measures aren’t in any way a beacon, drawing attention to issues with really quite basic stuff; they’re actually a great reassurance that these people are extra reliable, aren’t they? To give an example – what proportion of serious road traffic collisions involve drivers who’ve already been banned from driving? Probably not even half.

Similarly, when a grown adult man has a curfew imposed on him, it’s almost a badge of respectability, isn’t it? “I’m 35 years old and my boss says I have to be home by midnight – you can trust me.”

Whose idea was it to impose a curfew anyway? Presumably not Ben Stokes, who went along with it for the first two days of a Test match that barely stretched to three. 

It doesn’t sound like Brendon McCullum was really hammering it home either, despite his vague, borderline unintelligible protestations.

“Some will say, ‘Did everyone know about the curfew?'” he said on Monday, according to Cricinfo. “I think most of you guys know about the curfew and I’ve spoken at length about it. We constantly refer to it in the dressing-room. In my south Dunedin way, I reference it in a slightly more informal manner, but it is referenced constantly.”

We would love to know the informal south Dunedin way of referencing a mandatory curfew. We would like to know the exact wording.

What we have here is a silly bedtime rule for daft young men, enforced by pillocks. The upshot so far has been two suspensions and – because one of those players was the captain and all-rounder – ripples that are so much greater and more destructive. 

To give just three examples:

• The triggering of a stand-in captain’s PTSD
• A spinner who missed out on a Test match so that England could be better ‘balanced’ for the resultant 253-run defeat
• Three young cricketers whose lifelong ambition of being picked for England felt like equal parts hospital pass and afterthought (and two of whom were straight back out of the team again – thanks for coming)

What’s impressive here is how many people continue to suffer significant personal and professional consequences because of honestly not very much at all really.

If you take out Harry Brook getting lamped by a nightclub bouncer a few months ago, what has anyone actually done? A bunch of them drank beer in Australia and didn’t bother anyone. Stokes and Gus Atkinson went to a place where a rugby player acted like a bell-end.

All in all, this is the dumbest handling of a non-issue and every effort that’s been made to address it has only created three new ways for the situation to spiral further out of control. The ECB should hire Dr Ian Malcolm to explain what’s happening to them. 

They need a fresh start. But how could you have a fresh start? How can anyone heed the words of Rayden and trust who they need to trust against this backdrop? 

After the Ashes, the chief executive of the ECB, Richard Gould, trusted the managing director of England men’s cricket, Rob Key, to put things right. Key then trusted McCullum to deliver this, and McCullum trusted Stokes. Together, they all concluded that renewed trust would require tighter restrictions on the players; an approach that is – as we’ve already laid out – the absolute antithesis of trust.

So now we have a situation where dumb, counterproductive rules are being both enforced and broken by people who don’t believe in them and the only solution – binning them off entirely and acting like grown ups – is the only thing these people can’t do because the same dumb rules have become symbolic penance for a load of mostly unrelated failings.

It’s the kind of situation where you’d want a coach like Brendon McCullum to breeze in, preaching joy and liberty and personal responsibility, and just generally clearing the decks of all this crap. As most of us know, it’s quite hard to have a fresh start from yourself though.

Remember when Joe Root was England’s permanent Test captain? Remember Joe Root Burnout Watch? He did another three years after that and things got worse. That kind of experience will scar a man.

Way back in the mists of time, several years before half the world’s wealth had been funneled into a handful of massively, massively unprofitable AI companies, Joe Root was England’s full-time Test captain.

The year was 2019 and our Joe had the unenviable task of captaining a wobbly England team through five Ashes Tests in six and a half weeks, while also batting at three, 18 days after a gruelling World Cup campaign that they’d been building towards for four years.

Root started out looking pretty tired. We calculated he was already 42 per cent burnt out before the Ashes had even begun. A few weeks later, in the wake of the Headingley Test, we posted our fourth and final instalment of Joe Root Burnout Watch and then quietly retired the feature because it was starting to feel too cruel.

And then he carried on. Having already been to Australia and captained England to one 4-0 defeat, he only went and did it again, but somehow in an even worse way. And with covid lockdown restrictions to boot.

“You are burnt out from the start,” was Paul Collingwood’s assessment of that last aspect.

Root had already been smouldering for a couple of years even before that. A few months later, he stood down from the captaincy, a comprehensively broken man.

A quick dip in the hot tub time machine to bring us back to 2026 and, after Ben Stokes stayed out past his bedtime, Root was talking borderline enthusiastically about the prospect of captaining England again.

“That is one thing – in a small way, in a good way – I was slightly envious of that opportunity to work with someone like Baz in this sort of capacity,” he said in the lead-up to the second Test. “It has been really cool the last couple of days.”

And then that Test got underway and all coolness evaporated. How the memories must have come flooding back.

How many times has Root presided over a colossal lower order partnership as an all-seam attack has banged in endless costly short balls? We don’t wish to exaggerate, but we would guess at least four trillion times.

A chaotic run-out, a steady dribble of non-scores from the batters, a dearth of experience in all areas of the team – it was all there.

And also, the piece de resistance really – not exactly a familiar trauma, so much as a brand new failure borne from an older one.

Back when he had the job permanently, Root had a tendency to bowl Jofra Archer literally every chance he got before inadvertently badmouthing him for not trying hard enough. “I think there are certain spells where he can just unleash a little bit more,” he infamously once said.

Who is whispering to Michael Vaughan about Jofra Archer?

Archer’s stress-fractured medical record now demands more careful management and Root has apparently signed up to this in full. With New Zealand’s tail untroubled, in the first innings of a Test match, England’s locum leader spent 90 long minutes conspicuously failing to bring Archer on to bowl – a spectacular commitment to “load management” that resulted in Jacob Bethell coming on first change with the second new ball.

You bowled him too much; you bowled him too little. You weren’t imaginative enough; you were unnecessarily funky. Who, honestly, in Joe Root’s position, would be willingly grasping the captaincy nettle right now?

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Of the England bowlers who won the first Test for England, Ben Stokes, Gus Atkinson and Ollie Robinson are all, for one reason or another, unavailable for selection for the second Test. In now time honoured fashion, Brendon McCullum has weighed this pace bowling shortfall and concluded the best way to react would be by dropping the spinner, Shoaib Bashir. This is hardly surprising given he’s now working with Joe Root, who kind of started this whole spinner-free trend in the first place.

Jofra Archer, Matt Fisher and Sonny Baker are to join Josh Tongue in a four-man attack. If the pitch does spin, England will turn to Root and Jacob Bethell. The fact they have multiple options is significant because if you’ve got two mediocre-to-poor spin bowlers, you can fail to make the most of conditions at both ends.

The first thing to note here is that Bashir didn’t do anything wrong in the first Test. The second thing to note is that he didn’t do anything right in the first Test either. He didn’t do anything. The Home of Quagmires rendered him superfluous and he didn’t bowl a single ball.

But – key detail here – the Oval is a different pitch. It may be only four miles away as the crow flies, but different people do different stuff with it and it is consequently a different thing. There’s been much talk about how Surrey haven’t bothered playing spin bowlers in recent years, but less talk about how they’ve mostly been labouring their way through arduous, high-scoring draws this season while working to that same philosophy.

We would play a spinner. But then we would always play a spinner.

Aside from all the strategic reasons and our belief that Test cricket is all about evolving conditions and presenting batters with diverse challenges, failing to play a spinner also smacks of poor personnel management.

Maybe Root didn’t have much of a say in this one, but it’s hard to avoid thinking back to that time he and Chris Silverwood thought it would be a great idea to pick five right-arm fast-medium bowlers in Australia. Those two repeatedly went out of their way to pick no-one at all over Jack Leach and Jack Leach responded by losing all joie de vivre and deteriorating as a Test bowler.

Root and Silverwood have the Jack Leach that they created

England lost a lot of matches around that time and that resulted in Silverwood no longer being coach and Root no longer being captain.

They were replaced by McCullum and Stokes and initially these two went the other way: they picked Leach for every game.

Where their predecessors had said not merely that they didn’t rate Leach, but that they didn’t even value spin bowling as a craft, the new fellas picked him every game and Stokes gave him bags of overs. Sometimes he even asked him to open the bowling.

It was largely injury that saw Leach slip down the pecking order, which meant that when England continued picking Bashir after he recovered, it kind of came across as a big vote of confidence. ‘We think you’re better than our previous first choice who we clearly loved’ kinda thing. The bowler himself felt this to the extent he started to believe he was almost twice as tall as he actually is.

But then England stopped picking Bashir, and they stopped picking a real spinner, and they’re still doing it, and honestly it’s all starting to feel depressingly SilverRootish again.

And that’s where we are: Gus Atkinson’s on the naughty step, Ben Stokes stayed out past his bedtime and Ollie Robinson’s found a back way out of the team again, so England have dropped their spin bowler.

We’ll ask the question again: How tall does Shoaib Bashir feel right now?

So how tall does Shoaib Bashir feel right now? (Presumably not 10 feet tall)

Over the last 24 hours, we’ve been steering our exasperation towards amusement through the simple tactic of mentally rewriting all references to England curfews so that they’re instead about bedtimes. The two things are much the same, after all. Doing this swap is funny and it also helps highlight how really very silly all of this has got. 

Silly or not though, there’s plenty of talk this monumental temporal crime could be the end of Ben Stokes, the England cricketer.

Just look at the headlines: 

• Test captain considering his future after bedtime incident
• Stokes England captaincy on line after bedtime breach 
• Stokes to hold crisis talks after staying up past his bedtime

Some would say a great England cricketer deserves a better end than this, but we would counter that it would be hard to manufacture an exit even half as striking and unexpected as Stokes’s career has been. Maybe this is fitting. Maybe it’s an opportunity he needs to grasp. 

From getting hit in the dick and immediately confirming, “Oof, right in the dick!” over the stump mic to playing one of the most preposterously bipolar innings of all time, Ben Stokes has always been a spectacularly zany cricketer. We cannot really envision a zanier finish than being pushed out of the game because he stayed up past his bedtime on his birthday.

What is the most staggering aspect of Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson’s involvement in a nightclub “incident”?

History has changed. If you google “Ben Stokes nightclub incident,” you now see an entirely different Ben Stokes nightclub incident than the one that’s been at the top of the results page for the last nine years. If you’re catching up on the details, this new one – which we’ll call Ben Stokes Nightclub Incident 2.0 – also features Gus Atkinson and a Saracens rugby player. 

Follow on… (That means ‘continue reading’)

History has changed. If you google “Ben Stokes nightclub incident,” you now see an entirely different Ben Stokes nightclub incident than the one that’s been at the top of the results page for the last nine years. If you’re catching up on the details, this new one – which we’ll call Ben Stokes Nightclub Incident 2.0 – also features Gus Atkinson and a Saracens rugby player. 

Sage words there. Sage words from a cricketer who knows the perils that unavoidably go hand in hand with heading out for a few jars after a Test win. Sage words from Ben Stokes in 2019.

The sentiments expressed above convey roughly where Ben Stokes Nightclub Incident 1.0 got filed away in the end. The crime wasn’t what he did. The crime was being there.

Yet here we are again. Or rather… there he was again.

What does this mean? Is this the end?

It has to be said, the Ben Stokes Nightclub Incident that has been freshly wiped from page one of the search results suggests these sorts of things certainly needn’t be a barrier to playing for England. 

You may forget this because it’s such a weird fact, but on that occasion Stokes’ suspension was actually lifted the moment he was charged with a criminal offence. He was of course subsequently cleared of affray and later assumed the England Test captaincy. There might be a weird echo of this occurring elsewhere in the team.

Harry Brook was involved in another “incident” in a nightclub over the winter. It was a pretty major reason why the England players are now subject to a humiliating curfew, like schoolchildren or GPS-tagged convicted burglars.

Stokes surveyed that strict moral landscape and led by example and you feel he’ll be judged on that basis. This was not just going out and breaking a curfew, it was doing it as captain when England players were being restricted precisely because of previous incidents like the one that apparently ensued. That could be that for Stokes, unfortunately. Consequences.

Except this means that having very much set the ball rolling on this recent trend for misjudged night-time activity, Test vice captain Brook is now poised for a promotion because of the backdrop he himself created.

Nightclub incidents?

But none of these things are, to our mind, the most astonishing aspect. Maybe there are some reporting inaccuracies here, but the most staggering detail is surely the plain, straightforward fact that Ben Stokes went to a nightclub.

What year is it? 1998? Who honestly goes to nightclubs in this day and age? The youths certainly don’t – Gen Z are the most sober group of all – and middle-aged people obviously don’t either because they’re middle-aged.

You might argue that Ben Stokes falls between these groups, dodging both trends, but we’d argue he’s at the nexus, subject to both. Ben Stokes is a 35-year-old father of two who spends his entire working life mixing with 20-somethings. He has a foot in both camps, he knows both worlds, and yet he actively made a decision to go to a nightclub?

None of this makes sense.

It’s become one of the great, weird, modern cricket clichés that Brendon McCullum has the ability to make players feel they are an incorrect height. (Invariably taller, invariably 10 feet.) But he doesn’t always make them feel that, does he? We’d be interested to know what height Shoaib Bashir currently believes himself to be, for example.

McCullum has previously said that his job is to make, “all those that sit in the dressing room feel like they can be 10 foot tall and bulletproof when they walk out to play.”

Upon his appointment by England, New Zealand’s Henry Nicholls (Hinry Knuckles to you) conveyed his heartfelt belief that his former captain was possessed of precisely this ability. “He gave everyone around him a lot of confidence and sort of made you feel like you were 10 feet tall and bulletproof,” he said.

Around the same time, Ben Stokes concurred that this was his new colleague’s USP: “He is all about making everyone feel, in his words, ’10 feet tall’.”

It’s a slightly weird goal. How would you actually feel if you were 10 feet tall? Gangly? Awkward? Hugely self conscious? Maybe you have a different perception of these things if, like McCullum, you’re only 5ft 7in yourself.

Everyone seems to buy into this artificial height inflation in any case. James Anderson said that midway through that first Test, McCullum spoke to the whole team and afterwards, “we all felt 10 feet tall.” (Maybe it was because they were towering over him. Or maybe he was standing far away.)

Speaking after the match, Stuart Broad went even further, saying the whole environment was now geared towards incorrectly gauging one’s height. “It’s not too structured,” he said of the new England setup. “It’s just a case of what do you need to do to make you feel you’re 10 foot tall?”

Stuart Broad: Titan of Ridiculousness

We could easily go on and on with this. (Josh Tongue: “I’m lucky to work under two coaches who make you feel 10 feet tall.” Sam Billings: “It’s to the point, it’s clear, it’s clarity, and it’s about making you feel 10 feet tall.”) But you get what we’re saying: Brendon McCullum’s philosophy is all about inculcating misconceptions about height.

The shrinking potion

But not everyone feels 10 feet tall do they? Some people might have felt 10 feet tall for a bit, but not many are banging their heads on the doorframe on the way out of the team.

This morning, Andy Bull gave a striking rundown of the 11 titans who played in that first Test match when the world was so small and the sky was so blue. Of those, Alex Lees, Zak Crawley, Ollie Pope, Jonny Bairstow, Ben Foakes, Matt Potts, Stuart Broad, James Anderson and Matt Parkinson have all now exited the stage.

Even if Ben Foakes is “the best wicketkeeper in the world” he’s only worth so much to England

Look through those names and only Broad can possibly have retained all of his artificially acquired height. All the rest were handed a tape measure and reality check.

Which brings us to Shoaib Bashir.

Upon becoming England’s youngest player to 50 Test wickets, Bashir said: “I walk into this England team and I feel 10 feet tall because of the backing I get, and that makes a massive difference. I feel like I’m very well backed here. I’m well backed in county cricket as well, but I feel like England cricket is my happy place.”

So how tall did he feel when England so conspicuously stopped backing him, over the winter?

Still no Shoaib Bashir then. Do you remember when Ben Stokes used to back his spinners?

When everything was on the line in the big A-rated target series, England concluded they didn’t really trust Bashir. They didn’t just leave him out of the team; they omitted him in favour of someone who was only ever going to be a buyer of wickets and a scorer of meaningless consolation runs.

Now Bashir’s back, but surely not at the towering height of old, because it’s a lot harder to give a player a Goliath complex when you were the one responsible for the previous shrinkage.

It can be done, of course, but where Ollie Robinson has been brought back and embiggened with a conspicuous, growth hormonal, “We really want you, mate,” Bashir has simply seeped back into the team. He is essentially filling a void that was first created when England reappraised his height when the stakes were at their highest.

Reselection therefore doesn’t come across as a big vote of confidence in Bashir’s ability. Not really. It’s not nothing – England clearly kind of like him – but he’s no longer being buoyed by the unequivocal Baz boosterism that he himself said was previously helping him so much.

So what height do you attribute to yourself with this kind of qualified support? In reality Shoaib Bashir is 6ft 4in – but how tall does he currently feel?

In the wake of England’s most successful Ashes tour for 15 years, it was widely agreed that some England players needed to play smarter and so that is what Brendon McCullum has promised to deliver henceforth. Some players didn’t need to play smarter though. One in particular has built an enviable record through his absolute wholehearted commitment to playing the daftest cricket he can imagine.

No-one’s saying Harry Brook had a great Ashes, even though he was England’s second-highest run-scorer and pretty much averaged 40. However, the fact those returns were seen as a colossal failure is because of what preceded them.

Did you see… Harry Brook’s first ball in Melbourne? Unquestionably the 2025/26 Ashes’ finest moment

Brook’s witless self-destruction and addiction to circus flourishes has so far furnished him with a Test batting average of 54.79. Plaintive cries that his approach means he’s not making the most of his talent rather overlook that simple fact. No-one has averaged that much for England since the 1960s. We’d therefore argue that, if anything, Brook has hit upon a way of transcending his talent.

The last time England played New Zealand saw Brook at his daft best. In the first Test, he frittered away several lives while taking England from 45-3 to 381-6 via a personal score of 171. In the second Test, he walked out at 26-3 and when England fell to 50-4, he responded with an onslaught of fours and sixes, adding 22 to the total in his next seven balls.

He finished with 123 off 115 balls with 11 fours and five sixes. 

It was Peak Harry Brook.

Are we already watching peak Harry Brook?

He was going pretty well at this point. The month before, he’d hit 317 off 322 balls against Pakistan – England’s first triple hundred since Graham Gooch’s 333 against India in 1990.

Shackleslessness

Last time New Zealand toured, the whole England team needed pulling in a more carefree direction. Some did better out of this group recalibration than others, but almost everyone benefited to some degree. McCullum’s was a broad message that initially brought a massive net positive.

It was a neat trick and very well executed, but having already secured those gains, McCullum’s coaching method of continuing to say much the same things in the hope that things would continue getting better and better clearly didn’t work. England didn’t really get any further. If anything, they went backwards because several of the newer, younger players would in fact have benefited more from being steered in the opposite direction.

Ollie Pope, for example. “I was probably just too eager to put the bowlers under pressure without necessarily realising it at the time,” he conceded of his own Ashes failures. 

In short, the wider team messaging was doing him few favours.

Is Ollie Pope still in the same galaxy as the England Test team?

This is a bit of a side point, but there’s actually a case here that the players who would benefit most from McCullum’s new post-Ashes goal of becoming “slightly smarter in some of those key moments” are the likes of Pope and Zak Crawley, who aren’t around any more.

And while those players were clearly pulled too far from their own, personal optimal approach, responding to that by turning the whole ship around now risks blunting the effectiveness of the players who did respond well.

For example, as mad as it sounds, floating the notion that there are times when you shouldn’t bat like a complete dingbat could stymie England’s most dynamic batter. Batting like a complete dingbat is never the answer, but you also don’t want to steer Harry Brook too far away from that, because evidence suggests his peak performance level – a level that is really quite fantastically accomplished – sits quite a long way towards the dingbat end of the spectrum.

Team philosophies are hazardous matter in a game that is to a great extent won and lost by individuals. What might land as a sensible bit of advice for one team member can destructively undermine another.

You don’t want Harry Brook trying to bat like Jacques Kallis. You want to get the best out of him, and to do that, you want to keep him just about within touching distance of dingbat.

Send your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Please consider putting the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself. We like those ones.

We took The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments to Warwick Castle during October half-term.

It seemed a little nonplussed by the castle stuff and didn’t want to engage with various Halloween themed elements, like the headless horseman. It did however enjoy the playground and in particular the Zog slide.

It’s Father’s Day in a week or two

…or three (June 21).

Shipping times being what they are, it might be worth dropping a few subtly worded hints to your kids to, “PLEASE GET ME THIS EXACT BOOK: FOLLOW THIS LINK AND BUY IT FROM HERE.”

You can also get The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments from…

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An historic day. Not many teams get the better of Ireland in Test cricket. New Zealand today inflicted only their second ever defeat in home conditions and their first by an innings. Extraordinary stuff.

Even more amazingly, New Zealand had never before got the better of Ireland, home or away. Throw in the fact Ireland’s only previous home defeat was to Pakistan, way back in 2018, and you’d have got long odds on this result before the schedule was agreed and the fixture was inked-in (whenever that was).

Not many teams come to Ireland and win a Test match. England have never done it, for example – although they have at least notched that difficult first Test victory over them, thanks to Jack Leach’s second-silliest innings.

There’s hope there and in New Zealand’s success for the likes of poor enfeebled India, Australia, South Africa and the West Indies, who are all yet to get off the mark against the mighty Irish.

Ireland now and then and maybe again

When England first played Ireland in a Test match four years ago, we had visions of it becoming an annual fixture with a slowly developing history. We’ve followed England cricket long enough to know there was pretty much zero chance that would happen, but the prospect only seemed more remote during the second Test match between the two nations.

Read more…